Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hearing someone behind him, Will Graham twirls around and sends the end of his blade falling down into the approaching man’s skull. The pirate clatters to the wood deck of the ship, frozen like ice before Will’s eyes. For a moment, it’s just the two of them out there on the open sea, Will and a man he never even knew under the blue of the sky and surrounded by the blue of the sea. They’re like two pairs—the men, and the shades of blue. He wonders which of them he is, the sea or the sky. Which would keep him alive? is a better question.

There’s another rustle at his right, and he sticks his leg out and trips an ostensibly clever man who’d apparently thought he could sneak up on a sailor with his gaze lost out in nuances of blue. Will raises his eyebrows at the man, lying on his back at his feet, and almost feels humored. He might even be smiling faintly as he strikes the pirate’s heart, impaling him with his sword. When he draws the steel out, it’s dripping with shining scarlet.

After that little show, the rest of his ship’s attackers aren’t so quick to go after him, save a few thinking they’d relish a challenge. Unlike his shipmates, they don’t pause long enough to realize why they’re losing so badly against a single man, and a fairly scrawny-looking one at that, compared to the rest of them.

Of course, it’s the cleverest of them all—ostensibly—that figures it out.

In the end, it’s just him and Hannibal Lecter, alone in the rear of the ship, unnoticed. Neither of them brandish a sword; rather, they just catch their breath there in the shadows for a moment.

The infamous pirate Hannibal looks relatively immaculate for a fight of this magnitude, although it has turned out to be one fought with swords and daggers rather than cannonballs. Will’s is a small ship, but he supposes that pirates need fishing boats, too. He contemplates asking the man how he manages to keep his hair so perfect amidst so much roaring sea breeze. Not a hair on his head is out of place.

Will’s hair isn’t so straight, so tawny—try dark, curly, always imperfect, the kind of locks his grandmother had used to call devilish. The only thing to do with it is cut it, his only reconciliation being that with such a texture to his hair, he could basically hack at it with a knife and no one would notice it wasn’t done by a professional.

Hannibal produces a dagger from his sleeve and twirls it between his fingers, looking Will up and down as if searching for a weak spot. He doesn’t look satisfied until he catches Will’s eye.

Will supposes that if his weakness was visible anywhere, it’d be there.

“You’re different than the rest of them,” Hannibal says with an air of confidence. He doesn’t move any closer to Will, just toys with his dagger, leaning against the boat's mast.

Will can hear the clangs and clashes of swords in one direction, and the splash of sea on wood in all of them. “I assume you believe you are, too, since you were so observant as to notice,” he answers. The pirate smiles at him, delighted, or doing a decent impression of the emotion, anyway. Will crosses his arms, very aware of the sword at his side, as if by being so he could draw it more quickly. “So what’s your deal?” he asks, narrowing his eyes. He stares into Hannibal’s, trying to see in their dark. No luck—they’re black, without reflection. Will supposes that that makes him the sea, then.

He’s staring at the sky.

Hannibal draws closer to Will, but he’s put the dagger away again, if it’s any consolation. Will isn’t sure it is. The man pins him to the edge of the ship with his shadow and says, “I’m more interested in yours.”

Will snorts, feeling the urge to laugh again. “Naturally.”

Half of the pirate’s mouth smiles. He must shave daily, Will thinks, eyeing the man with mild apprehension. He leans back into the open sea air when Hannibal gets an inch closer.

And then he steps back just as abruptly as he’d appeared in the shadows, and sets to pacing back and forth before Will, who still feels pinned to the spot. He walks slowly, each step a deliberate, suspenseful beat. “Obviously, you’re the perfect killing machine,” says Hannibal. His eyes flash around, as if trying to follow a dozen threads of thought. “Mathematically speaking, your Achilles heel would have been found by now, with as many sword partners as you’ve had.” He says “partners” as if he’s talking about something that definitely isn’t sword fighting. Well, not really, Will thinks, and smiles slightly.

Hannibal pauses before Will. “If it was physical,” he says, and reaches out with an empty hand to lift Will’s chin, locking their gazes together. “You don’t like to talk, do you,” he says, appearing to read the words right off of Will’s face. They’ve always been there, of course.

Will doesn’t answer, so the pirate continues, without removing his hand, “All my men have been slaughtered at your blade because they’re just trying to best you in the fight itself. No one could do that,” he says, and his black eyes gleam in the morning sunlight. “Except myself, perhaps.”

Will shrugs, his lips pursed in apparent consideration, and Hannibal laughs.

“So we aim for the other parts, trying to find our weakness,” he says, letting go of Will only to place a hand on the sailor’s chest a moment later. “We aim for the mind. The heart. It’s beating rather fast, you know,” he adds as a side note.

Will rolls his eyes and reaches for his sword. The pirate catches his wrist before he can unsheathe it, surprising Will with his strength. He could crush Will’s bones to powder, the sailor finds himself believing.

In large contrast to his death grip on Will's wrist, Hannibal’s tone is quite amiable. “I wasn’t finished yet,” he says evenly. “I don’t even know your name.” The sailor grits his teeth at Hannibal’s increasing pressure on his wrist.

“It’s Will,” he says, unable to match the pirate’s smooth cadence. “Will Graham. Can I kill you now?” The pirate bares his teeth like weapons with his next smile. He’s close enough to Will that the fronts of their shirts are grazing against each other.

“You can try,” the man allows, and steps back to let the breeze rush between them, cool. “So, where does a dish like you come from?” he asks as he draws his sword. Will does the same, and ignores the rather salacious question in favor of blocking the man’s wide swing.

“You especially hate talking while you fight,” Hannibal observes, ducking Will’s sword. “Exchanging words, pleasantries… when you’re shoving your sword in someone’s face, you don’t want it to be tainted with such empty filth.” His blade meets Will’s easily, with every swing. “While it doesn't distract you much,” he continues, unperturbed, “processing dialogue slows you down just enough to make you a fair match, Will.”

The tip of his sword flies just past Will’s head, nicking his earlobe and sending a small curl of his hair floating without a root.

Hannibal is practically narrating. “So you attempt to block out my voice,” he says. “And it helps a little, maybe. But your ears betray you, perking up when I say your name, speak with fighting words, anything that might serve to give you an advantage. It’s scientific. You can’t escape it, Will.”

The pirate’s sword glides past Will’s cheek, sending tiny droplets of blood flying from the cut. The sailor realizes that the man is playing with him, and narrows his eyes. He’s smiling, he realizes, in spite of everything. It’s more of a grimace than a laugh, more the look of madness than anything.

“You,” he says irritably, “are a dick, sir.” He sidesteps a swing and sends the butt of his sword slamming into Hannibal’s arm in one fluid, inhuman movement. The hit is accentuated by the crunch of bone breaking. “Although I suppose I oughtn’t to even call you that—the ‘sir’ part, anyway.”

Hannibal laughs again, painfully, but also breathlessly, and a single piece of his hair falls out of place, getting in his eyes. Will realizes that with every second of their fight, the pirate only looks more alive, while he himself is merely growing tired. This has been going on for too long, he reminds himself. The din around them has grown quiet. Or maybe it’s just his imagination.

In Will’s head, they are alone, and no one can disturb the floor of their arena. With those walls in place like a fort, he can forget words, other people, the sea, and let the devil inside him come raging out without fear of consequence. Hannibal is aware of this, and can even slow the beast a bit, but in the end, he is nothing to it. He’s too human.

Will doesn’t end up with the man’s neck at the tip of his sword by concentrating harder. Rather, he allows his mind to slip away, and lets the thing inside take control of his hands, gripping the sword, and his feet, sidestepping and leaping, back and forth like pendulums. In his imagination, it’s shaped like an enormous, dark stag, the thing. It’s the stuff of nightmares, and not even the infamous Hannibal Lecter could ever think to match it.

At the end of Will’s sword, and his life, the pirate merely looks delighted, and it’s that look that brings Will back. “You’re supposed to be scared, you know,” the sailor points out, coming back to himself. “Of dying.” His fingers are tense around the hilt of his blade.

“Surely an intelligent man like you would realize that it’s only the beginning,” Hannibal answers. Will stares, trying to figure the man out. Then, there’s a blade at his throat, at each of his sides, at the back of his neck. Surrounded by Hannibal’s men, he realizes what’s happened just as the pirate says it.

“Besides,” the man says calmly, stepping back from Will’s falling sword, “it was only a distraction, Will.” He says the sailor’s name like it’s a music note, a one-syllable song fit for a siren to sing.

With that, Will’s hands are tied behind his back. It’s Hannibal himself that carries the sailor back to his cabin, holding him to his chest as if the man were his bride.

“It was nice meeting you, Will,” the pirate says as he drops the man to the floor, and locks the door before exiting, his movements smooth as ever.

Alone in the captain’s cabin—or what was the captain’s cabin, anyway—Will sighs. The bed looks comfortable and inviting to a sailor used to sleeping in a hammock, but Will doesn’t have time for that just yet.

He sets to trying to unlock the door.

Chapter Text

Hannibal never quite looks tired before he falls asleep, Will has noticed. The man does drift off, and almost always before Will, unless he’s an incredibly convincing liar. He’s still not sure that isn’t the case, but, of course, his paranoia has just gotten worse with time and experience.

Will doesn’t exactly feel inclined to sleep while lying in Hannibal’s king-sized mattress, and especially not with the man himself strewn across the sheets beside him. There’s too much thinking involved, too much of the man’s hands on him, too much fire not to be alert just in case it might end up burning him.

It’s different when Hannibal falls asleep, though—Will can hear the doctor’s breathing slow to a steady, unconscious tempo, and feel his body going slack in Will’s arms. It’s calming, to have such a creature resting just beneath his fingertips. Hannibal is both his cat and his guard dog, a mysterious companion and a three-headed monster only waiting for someone to try to get near Will. They wouldn’t last long, Will estimates. He doesn’t think he’s wrong.

Tonight, it’s the same thing. Hannibal looks impossibly alert, with maybe the only indication of his tiredness in the lazy movements of his pupils, glancing rather than darting back and forth. His bare chest is pressed against the back of Will’s night shirt, his arms wrapping around Will like extra limbs, as if, together, they make up some multi-armed god. Or a demon. Hannibal buries his face in Will’s neck, his lips brushing against the man’s shoulder.

“You haven’t cut your hair in a while,” the doctor points out, murmuring into Will’s neck. His words feel warm on Will’s skin.

Will shrugs as much as is possible. “I haven’t really given it any thought,” he says.

Of course, Hannibal has. “I like it,” the man says softly, running a hand through Will’s loose, dark curls.

“Hm,” Will says, and it’s more of a sound than a word, a response more than an actual reply. Not agreement, necessarily, but not dissent. Just… acknowledgment. He’s not sure if he has any plans to do anything with his hair, now nearly reaching his shoulders in length. He supposes he’s seen it growing, stared at it in the mirror. He’d just never really thought about it at length.

Of course, Hannibal has.

Will can feel the man playing with his hair, lifting strands up and over each other like he’s braiding them. He thinks of fishing knots, and imagines Hannibal’s hands as his own, treating his hair as religiously as Will would a lure as he tied and constructed it. He wonders what that makes his hair, or him, if not the fisherman.

He turns his head to the side a little to look at Hannibal when he hears the man whisper, “Oh…”

The doctor’s face looks positively enchanted. Will gives him a curious look out of the corner of his eye.

“You don’t happen to have a hair tie, do you?” Hannibal asks.

“Um, no. Why?” With the moment quickly turned from lazily comfortable to awkward and confusing—this really happens much too often, Will thinks—he is awake again, staring at the one of Hannibal’s hands that isn’t ensconced in his hair. When the doctor doesn’t say anything for a moment, Will says, “Please tell me why you need a hair tie. This really happens much too often, you know.” He’s somewhere between annoyed and humored, but more the latter, if anything.

“What?” Hannibal’s voice is low, bemused, airy. It’s both frustrating and attractive. Kind of a package deal, Will figures.

“You like… do something, and then don’t explain it. I mean, do what you want. But it’s weird,” Will admits. He looks straight ahead, at the wallpaper, a pattern of red stripes on darker red.

“Hm.” The sound again. Hannibal really is a demon—angels don’t sound like that, Will is sure, but neither do humans. “I was just thinking that your hair is all too amusing.”

“Oh,” says Will. “Um. Thanks.”

“In a good way, of course,” Hannibal goes on. “There are so many things I could do with it,” he says, and it’s here when Will starts to question things again—he’s pretty sure he’s the one who’ll be doing anything with his hair, thank you very much. But he stays quiet at the doctor goes on, mildly amused at Hannibal’s apparent wonder.

“You could wear it in a man-bun,” Hannibal whispers, sounding almost reverent. Will raises his eyebrows.

“Theoretically,” he says simply, half-shrugging again.

“A theory I’ll have to prove, of course,” the doctor says, and removes his fingers from Will’s curls only so that he can pull the man closer to his chest. “It’s late, Will,” he says after a few moments. “Sleep.”

For the first time in a while, it’s Will who falls asleep first. When he wakes up, the first thing that the light falling through Hannibal’s bedroom window catches is a new set of hair ties on the nightstand, next to Will’s glasses. He can smell the scent of eggs and bacon wafting in through the open door.

Chapter Text

He read once, somewhere, that it was a relaxing thing, to walk through cemeteries. Will steps through an open gate left ajar, slightly swinging in the light evening breeze, and tries to deduce if he's feeling calmer yet. He can't remember the precise wording of the article, but the main gist of it floats back as he walks through the rows of gravestones. The light of the setting sun just touches the back of his jacket.

He makes an abrupt stop at one of the rows, his leather shoes scarring the path adjacent to the grave markers. "You're not a horror story," he says softly to the stone before him, tilting his head, maybe a little sympathetic towards the whole place in general. "You're just... history." And maybe there is something a little interesting, if not easing, about standing on a spot of dead grass surrounded by ended stories. They have no more worries left, just finished things. He is surrounded by books, just not of the paper sort.

Will doesn't intend to, but he finds himself sitting across from the gravestone reading "Dr. Hannibal Lecter, 1895-1950." There's a verse of poetry below the name, or maybe just a few immensely beautiful words. He's not sure. His fingers trace the engraving, light, maybe a little reverent. Careful.

The marble is old, not shiny like some that are around them. He smiles a little to himself, emptily, when he realizes that he thinks of them as a relationship, as irrational as the idea is. It's a stone. A grave. A dead man. What it is, is preposterous.

It doesn't stop him from returning.

He visits Lecter more often and with more amiability than he shows towards anyone he knows. Perhaps because he knows them, and that is their downfall. He doesn't know the man under the green grass, tucked away in a coffin or an urn and encased in brown dirt. Perhaps it is his salvation.

It's a Friday evening when Will returns to the cemetery one day, because, evidently, he has no social life and doesn't particular want for one. He leaves his cell phone at home after he hears the ping of an incoming text message; instead of answering Alana, he nods a greeting at a statue of an angel down the row from Dr. Lecter. His stride is slow to the point of respectability but, if he's being honest with himself, he is itching to be near the doctor's stone again.

So maybe it's a little calming, or, at least, it's how he's been remembering it all week. He isn't quite sure how he will feel standing on that one particular bit of grass again--more anxious even than he is now? Or the opposite? He reaches the stone, slides his palm across the top of it.

He lets his mind short out for a moment, and thinks of nothing but the marble.

His work is getting to him, he knows that. He's always been on the edge between sarcastic and morbid, but this right here, this is him crossing that line. At the very least, he is tempting fate, having so much death on his mind. He's not sure how he wants to apply it to his own self. Are his black thoughts a desire to kill others, to kill himself, to become some manner of living dead--or does he simply desire to save people from such a fate, and in doing so, takes those cut lines of fates into himself? He lifts his hand before his eyes and imagines it composed of the strings of abandoned possibilities.

"I don't know what I'm doing here, Dr. Lecter," he says.

He comes back and tells himself it's only to answer that.

Chapter Text

Will tried the blind date thing once. He met a nice man with red hair named Greg through his colleague Alana Bloom, and they had a nice conversation about camping and fishing over dinner. Agreed to meet again, had another nice date. "Nice" is the perfect word for the whole thing, Will realizes now; it'd been just the right amount of pleasant, yet... completely and utterly mundane.

He questions that thought as he glances through the window set into his front door, not sure what to make of it. Greg had been nice. There hadn't really been anything wrong with him, per se. There'd been the second date, though, he recalls as his hand finds the doorknob and turns it. Yeah, that'd been it—

Greg had dropped him off back at his house afterwards and went, "You have a shit load of dogs, you know that?" when Winston and the rest came to the door as they drove up Will's driveway.

"I'm well aware," Will answered with a smile that was only somewhat nervous at the time. "Do you like dogs?"

"I'm allergic," Greg told him. The curve to Will's lips twitched in response.

To be honest, actually—Will doesn't remember whether it was Greg that never called back or him. Maybe it doesn't matter. He's in a new state now: Virginia, not Mississippi. A new town, a new-to-him house. New neighborhood, full of an eclectic mixture of old houses like his and new ones, both small and gargantuan, like the one across the street from him, whose shadow looms over his like a giant, or a wall meant to keep out giants. Not that he has a morbid imagination or anything, Will thinks with a grim hint of a smile crossing his lips.

He just... thinks too much. Quite often. That's pretty much it, he considers.

He likes the house next to his, a little old one-story where an older woman lives, and spends, apparently, most of her time gardening. Ms. Sherman is kind and welcoming, and likes dogs, to boot. (Suck it, Greg, Will thinks in the recesses of his mind.)

He remembers the man now specifically, as he's answering the door with a half dozen dogs following him like he's their mother duck, because there's something about opening up the door and finding someone with an armful of flowers on his doorstep that makes him think of dates.

The boy's wearing a beige-colored baseball hat with the name of a local flower shop scrawled across it in painstakingly casual cursive and looks markedly, awkwardly young. High school, Will figures. "I'm supposed to deliver these to you," the boy says, and passes the wrapped bouquet into Will's fumbling hands. They accept the flowers with instinct more so than certainty.

He doesn't really hear the delivery boy telling him to have a nice day; his ears are already tuning things out as his eyes look over the flowers, the petals yellow and blue, his eyes, bewildered. Maybe a little suspicious, too, because he determines after a moment that they're harmless and realizes he checked for explosives and sniffed for obvious poisons. He puts it down to instinct.

After a moment his fingers find a little card tied with a red ribbon into the bouquet. Nice paper, no razor blades, how kind, he thinks, and shakes his head at himself. He wonders who the hell is sending him flowers for a moment before opening the card, and thinks that maybe this is the wrong house, the wrong person, the wrong package. But his name is on the outside of the card. It's written in calligraphic ink, an elegant, effortless script that shames the flower shop logo. Nice pen, too.

"Maybe it's Greg," Will says down to his dogs with a ghost of a smile, and opens the card, flippant at first. I thought I might welcome you to the neighborhood, it says. You're welcome to stop by any time. It's signed, Hannibal Lecter.

Will peers out the window of his new/used house, out into the street, as if his new/used neighbor might be watching. He doesn't see anyone. Just Ms. Sherman, whom he waves at through the window, although she doesn't see. He looks longer, anyway, as if there might be someone to find.

Nothing. He wonders how the hell he's supposed to stop by if he doesn't know where Hannibal Lecter lives. His brain answers the question, or, more accurately, he realizes it already has when he starts deducing things. He could've just asked Ms. Sherman about it, he realizes later. But Will overthinks things, and maybe even relishes that, too, sometimes. Often, it makes his head spin and his eyes dizzy. Here, the prospect of figuring out the puzzle is compelling.

Well, it's not Ms. Sherman's house. He makes up a bulletin board in his head with pictures of all the houses on the street tacked onto it, and crosses off that one with a black marker. Another house is occupied by a four-person family, obviously not the sender or it'd have said "and family", he presumes. The one next to it and other ones are owned by single women—he's pretty sure Hannibal's not a girl's name—lesbians, people in relationships of the sort that doesn't involve sending flowers to Will Graham. Not that he's assuming they're indicative of any sort of romantic intention.

He glances down at them again, inhales the yellow and blue scents. Scratch that, they're romantic as hell, purposely or not. Will knows the smell of flowers just ordered online or carelessly bought for a funeral, a wedding, a Valentine's Day they didn't actually care about. These reek of the opposite, although he can't say what specifically produces the effect. He just knows it. He doesn't know what he thinks of the romance thing. He really likes the colors. Expensive flowers, he thinks, although he doesn't know much about that particular branch of life science.

He rearranges all the pictures of houses and tears most of them off the board, giving up on crossing them out. The house he's looking for is owned by an individual who is at least fairly wealthy, refined as hell down to the dots of his i's, male, probably homosexual, or some subtype of it. Lecter's interest in color is evident by the flowers, unless it's a happy accident that he's picked this bouquet, but, no, it doesn't feel like it. He tears almost every picture off the board, not even bothering to take out the tacks holding them there; they just fly as he tears. Only one house is left, in the end.

Will's eyes blink, closing off the makeshift office and opening up to his kitchen, and the house is right in front of him, through the window, across the street. He supposes, with mild chagrin, that he could have done that much more quickly.

It figures--when he goes out to get a closer look at his new neighbor's house, he realizes as he turns to go back inside that the flowers are the same colors as his own house. Relaxing ones, colors he's quickly come to associate with home, being alone, being peaceful, having his ankles and calves immersed in his dogs as they swirl around him and say "Hello, welcome back from work" in their own language.

Pyschologist, he adds to the list on the enigmatic Hannibal Lecter, and writes it next to a blank piece of paper on his mind-board, where the man's face will eventually be.

"Nice flowers," says Ms. Sherman from the fence that runs between their yards.

Will smiles back at her, and, looking down at the bouquet again, feels both welcomed and alarmed at the prospect of living in this new neighborhood.